College Confidential’s “Dean,” Sally Rubenstone, put together 25 of her best tips. So far, the "25 Tips from the Dean" eBook has helped more than 10K students choose a college, get in, and pay for it. Get your free copy: http://goo.gl/9zDJTM

You can major in anything as long as you take the pre-requisite classes. Biology seems to be popular due to the pre-reqs already falling into the major requirements, but I'm not sure if it being popular is a good or a bad thing for medical school. I heard Music is a good major for medical school...

I hear that there are harder admissions for bio students simply because everyone else is a bio student. I've heard of philosophy majors get into med school. But at the OP, chemical engineering is a solid major for pre-med. By the time you are done with your 2nd or so year you should have covered all the topics in the physical science section and o-chem section for the MCAT.

Screecher, while Moondoy's statement is true, you must also keep in mind that chemical engineering or any engineering major will be more of a "GPA killer" so to speak than practically any other major. I agree that if you are unsure about dental or pharmacy, an engineering undergrad will give you many more options to fall back on. However, you will have to take many engineering classes that will be very difficult, especially if you are not interested in them. If you really want to be a pharmacist or dentist, I think you might lack motivation in courses like advanced calc, differential equations, thermodynamics, calculus based physics etc... Courses like these will require a lot of effort and are required for engineers but are definitely overkill for dentists or pharmacists. Most people that you will be competing with for admissions to dental or pharmacy school will not have had to take such a rigorous course load and in turn might have higher GPAs. You should be aware of this.

For any professional school, your choice of major is secondary to your GPA. I know a couple of professors on the admissions committee at a highly ranked pharmacy school and every single one of them says that a high GPA and a high PCAT score from an applicant at a community college trumps lower scores from an applicant at a more highly ranked/regarded college. Before anyone on the adcom reads your application, it will first be screened by a secretary or computer program to discard either 1/2 to 1/3 of the lowest "ranked" applicants that are significantly lacking in either GPA or PCAT.

In conclusion, please do not pursue a chemical engineering degree if you do not plan on using it later on in your career as either someone in petroleum, process engineering, consumer products, graduate school, biotech, or any other field that requires intelligent people with a highly specialized subset of skills. You really only need an associate's degree from a 2 year college to get into any pharmacy school. There are also comined B.S/Pharm.D programs at numerous schools that shorten your total schooling time to 5-6 years, after which you can come out making a salary in the high 5 figures.

^^ However, to me that logic is flawed. Who is to say that a 4.0 biology major is any better of a student than a 3.5 engineering major? I have never understood that. They are basically forcing you to take the easier way out.

1. It just looks better and in stats such as USNews, there is no place to quantify how hard a major or college is. Thus, it's easier to just quantify a person's GPA and standardized test scores. It's also impossible to quantify how difficult a major is. Although it's widely accepted that the degree of difficulty for an engineering major is greater than for a biology major, there's no sure way to test for that.

2. All you need to demonstrate is that you're capable of learning and applying the material for any professional school. Academic performance in any major reflects on your intelligence and capacity for learning.

I'm not saying any of this is fair. It's just how the system works. The algorithms for weeding out a large proportion of applications have to be simple. Adcoms for professional schools are usually professors that don't have that much free time to spend reading and dissecting thousands of applications in a couple of months.

but i heard to get into pharmacy school for U of M (minnesota), you need a 4 year prerequesite(?) , so i though the only major that could be accepted, that im interested in for the fact of a good "fall back" plan, would be chemical engineering.

I don't think anyone has ever used a chemical engineering degree has a fall back plan. It was my undergraduate major, and I don't think that having it as a "fall back" is worth the time and effort that getting the degree takes. Almost nothing you learn from your cheme degree will help you in pharmacy. As someone mentioned earlier, the class load that you take requires a lot of work and will give you a unique skill set that is very appealing to a great many fields of work. A large number of people would say that pharmacy school would be a "fall back" for someone with a chemical engineering degree. Frequently, people maybe use pharmacy as a back up for medical, dental, or optometry school because it's easy to get into pharmacy school.

If you're really interested in pharmacy school, then you should devote all your effort to trying to achieve the highest GPA possible and study as hard as you can for the PCATs. The pharmacy professors I know have complained about the lack of truly qualified applicants every year. Thus, it shouldn't be hard for you to fulfill the prereqs for any pharmacy school and achieve a relatively good GPA (around 3.5) and decent PCAT scores.

I wouldn't listen to people on here. If you Google "Student Doctor Network Forums" you'll find bunch of threads covering this topics. Many ChemE's pursue a career in Pharmacy/Law/Medical School and YES your major will make you stand out of the typical applicant pool. Would adcoms who have been searching through a bunch of transcripts with a "Biology" major be intrigued by someone with a "Chemical Engineering" or "Biomedical Engineering" major? YES. Why else would adcoms prefer BME's over Biology majors in med school?

Helpful Links

About College Confidential

Welcome to the leading college-bound community on the Web!

Here you'll find hundreds of pages of articles about choosing a college, getting into the college you want, how to pay for it, and much more. You'll also find the Web's busiest discussion community related to college admissions, and our CampusVibe section!About Us